Oh yes, I just know that there's a telomere system or something that's related to aging...somehow...most of this is going off of half-remembered, suspicion-filtered stuff out of a sci-fi novel. And yes, I don't know biology hardly at all.

You could make an invisibility cloak of fibre optic strands that stick out like hairs perpendicular to the body being cloaked. These run around the body sticking out the other side. This would bend light around ze body turning it partially invisible (only partially because of the practicality of lining them up perfect and the inevitable gaps between round fibres).

That time travelling would split the universe into two parts, one being where you time travel from and the other where you end up after the time travel. From that point the two universes diverge. One universe would morn your disappearance, the other suffers your exploits. You could never return to your original universe but you could keep splitting universes. I liked it because it solved conundrums involving such as travelling back in time and somehow voiding my own conception and therefore not being able to travel back in time to void said conception.

If we could live without eating meat and therefore killing animals we were morally obligated not to.

ACU-LP wrote:I have always thought you would be able to see a shimmer or something anyway; tru invisibility would be epicly hard

That shimmer is what makes invisilbility cool.

Also, true invisibility is impossible, as you'd need tiny holes to let light into some visual system, or it would just be dark inside the invisibility cloak...

Umm, not if you used a grid of cell phones connected to a super computer... Other frequency's outside of the range an invisibility cloak could be used for some kind of sight, just not the typical visual spectrum.

So the sun rises in the east. And the geese fly south in the fall and winter. I look over my house as a child and I'll be darned, if that sun is rising in the east and it’s definitely the fall... why are those geese flying north? Or maybe the geese are flying south, in which case the sun is rising in the west..... ah screw it. I don't care if I don't know which way is north, I'm 6 and I live in a city.

Turns out the geese were flying north, because the Mississippi jogs north near my house and they were following that. No one ever gave these two bits of wisdom any value judgment, so I didn't know which one to trust more.

I also thought the sarlacc in the Great Pit of Carkoon connected to Jabba's stomach and that’s how he got that fat. I was 4 at the time.

Patman wrote:You could make an invisibility cloak of fibre optic strands that stick out like hairs perpendicular to the body being cloaked. These run around the body sticking out the other side. This would bend light around ze body turning it partially invisible (only partially because of the practicality of lining them up perfect and the inevitable gaps between round fibres).

I had the same idea, but I've since come up with the objection that, from an angle, this wouldn't actually look invisible. The parts of the "cloak" at an angle to you would seem darker, so the person would look invisible in the middle and then they would just like a cloak at the edges.

Patman wrote:You could make an invisibility cloak of fibre optic strands that stick out like hairs perpendicular to the body being cloaked. These run around the body sticking out the other side. This would bend light around ze body turning it partially invisible (only partially because of the practicality of lining them up perfect and the inevitable gaps between round fibres).

I had the same idea, but I've since come up with the objection that, from an angle, this wouldn't actually look invisible. The parts of the "cloak" at an angle to you would seem darker, so the person would look invisible in the middle and then they would just like a cloak at the edges.

That would be cool nonetheless though. HEHE (evil plans)

I Am Raven wrote:Math is like a penis: it can be very satisfactory, but also a pain in the ass.

RedvsBlue wrote:Wash: That was the worst throw ever. Of all time.Caboose: Not my fault. Someone put a wall in my way.

I remember thinking as a young kid abuot light- if I could get 2 mirrors and trap a lightbeam between them, would it stay there forever? And if so, could I add light to it until there was a really bright bit of light? (bah, a few decades earlier and I could have invented lasers...)

I even got two little mirrors and a torch and tried to (very quickly) turn the mirrors to try trap some. Which did not work.

I remember thinking as a young kid abuot light- if I could get 2 mirrors and trap a lightbeam between them, would it stay there forever? And if so, could I add light to it until there was a really bright bit of light? (bah, a few decades earlier and I could have invented lasers...)

I even got two little mirrors and a torch and tried to (very quickly) turn the mirrors to try trap some. Which did not work.

That is pretty sweet but the question remains; would you have come up with an acronym as cool as LASER?

Thread revival, because its too awesome to let die.I used to have a theory when I was little that computers/computer viruses, etc were just another form of life.After discussion on the topic, thats actually pretty much the case. Yay.

I Am Raven wrote:Math is like a penis: it can be very satisfactory, but also a pain in the ass.

RedvsBlue wrote:Wash: That was the worst throw ever. Of all time.Caboose: Not my fault. Someone put a wall in my way.

ACU-LP wrote:I have always thought you would be able to see a shimmer or something anyway; tru invisibility would be epicly hard

That shimmer is what makes invisilbility cool.

Also, true invisibility is impossible, as you'd need tiny holes to let light into some visual system, or it would just be dark inside the invisibility cloak...

Umm, not if you used a grid of cell phones connected to a super computer... Other frequency's outside of the range an invisibility cloak could be used for some kind of sight, just not the typical visual spectrum.

This made me think of that Doctor Who episode, where there was a background frequency that got everyone to vote the Master in as prime minister, and then they had the Tardis keys that put them on a different frequency and they were not invisible but unnoticed.Doctor who science is weird. Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey.

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right. - Salvor Hardin, From Isaac Asimov's "Foundation".

When I was 8 or so, I used to think that inside mirrors was an alternate universe, parallel to our own exactly, but just reversed. If we found a way to get the people on the other side to stop touching the mirrors when we did, we could pass into the universe and visit them. But, alas, every time you put your hand on a mirror, the other you does as well, blocking you. I used to try to trick the "other me" into not putting her hand up. I had very little success.

BomanTheBear wrote:Do not go looking for the stupidest thing ever said on the internets.

I have read that some here thought of the number line as a circle. When I was about 14, I took this one step further: a 2D coordinate system was an infinitely big ball (which, being infinite, would make the coordinate system flat again!), so on the other side, exactly opposite of (0|0), there would actually be the point [imath](\infty|\infty)[/imath], which would be the same as [imath](-\infty|-\infty)[/imath] or any other combination of these two. Nobody believed me, of course (or understood what I meant, probably. I wasn't very good at explaining...)Actually, I had been dreaming instead of listening in maths and when the teacher asked why a function could suddenly switch from positive to negative at a pole (or something like this), I told him that was because "it goes once around, to infinity and back on the other side". Unfortunately he had been looking for a much less creative answer along the lines of "because it's not defined", and probably never even thought about what I had just told him.It works for a lot of functions, who will then look more like several huge more-or-less circles around a ball. It doesn't work for lots of other functions, which simply don't come "around the ball" a second time (y=x² anyone? that'd look pretty stupid...)

I used to think aircraft control surfaces worked by pushing the air around, so if the left aileron was pointing down, it would push the air down, making the plane roll. It worked in practise as well, with many an errant paper-plane being fixed with a twist of the wings.

Turns out I was sorta doing the opposite of the Bernoulli effect.

Anything I said pre-2014 that you want to quote me on, just run it past me to check I still agree with myself.

solitarysock wrote:I have read that some here thought of the number line as a circle. When I was about 14, I took this one step further: a 2D coordinate system was an infinitely big ball (which, being infinite, would make the coordinate system flat again!), so on the other side, exactly opposite of (0|0), there would actually be the point [imath](\infty|\infty)[/imath], which would be the same as [imath](-\infty|-\infty)[/imath] or any other combination of these two. Nobody believed me, of course (or understood what I meant, probably. I wasn't very good at explaining...)Actually, I had been dreaming instead of listening in maths and when the teacher asked why a function could suddenly switch from positive to negative at a pole (or something like this), I told him that was because "it goes once around, to infinity and back on the other side". Unfortunately he had been looking for a much less creative answer along the lines of "because it's not defined", and probably never even thought about what I had just told him.It works for a lot of functions, who will then look more like several huge more-or-less circles around a ball. It doesn't work for lots of other functions, which simply don't come "around the ball" a second time (y=x² anyone? that'd look pretty stupid...)

This is actually common-place in complex analysis. Consider a sphere centered at the origin of the complex plane. Each point from the plane is mapped to the sphere by taking the line from the top of the sphere to the point, and using the point that line intersects the sphere. This makes positive and negative (well technically real and imaginary) infinity the same point (the top of the sphere). Zero is the bottom of the sphere. Its a cool coordinate system (and useful) because infinity is now a usable point.

If you consider just the circle along the real axis, and use the same rules, you get what you mentioned.

Mighty Jalapeno wrote:Well, I killed a homeless man. We can't all be good people.

When I was about 7 or 8 I had a very complicated system to remove the silly market based price system and replaced based off a complicated series of formulas based on the amount of energy (measured in joules) necessary to make any object, and then changed base off the condition it was in and the amount it was stored, how close it was to expiring, how much energy it took to transport the object etc. I ran into a wall when I realised that a power plant would create negative currency .

ACU-LP wrote:Hello all, first new topic for me, but I'm curious, how many of you had psuedo scientific theories or fantasies when you were younger; i.e. before teens.

I found the other day a "theory" of mine; I went like so;

"Black holes supposedly are singularities.Before the big bang, all the mass and energy and other random physics thingies were possibly all at one point, sometimes reffered to asA singularity.

Hence, it may be possible that black holes canot absorb mass infinitely, maybe there is a maximum saturation point at which the black hole detonates.Hence the big bang.Big bangs may also be happening at this very moment far beyond our visible universe. (would the explosion be so big as to destroy all evidence of previous existenses?)"

Bear in mind, at this point, my idea of the universe was that it was infinite. Also, there ARE spelling errors, but these are original....for sentimentality I included them. I was 11 at the time.

What I want to know is did any of you have any "theories"?Also, dicussion on feasability of our "theories" would be good.

OP, I have a feeling you, like me, were reading a lot of Stephen Hawking at that age.

Tocharian Candidate wrote:When I was about 7 or 8 I had a very complicated system to remove the silly market based price system and replaced based off a complicated series of formulas based on the amount of energy (measured in joules) necessary to make any object, and then changed base off the condition it was in and the amount it was stored, how close it was to expiring, how much energy it took to transport the object etc. I ran into a wall when I realised that a power plant would create negative currency .

That's where the idea of discounting comes in: a resource available now is worth more than the same resource available in the future.

ACU-LP wrote:Hello all, first new topic for me, but I'm curious, how many of you had psuedo scientific theories or fantasies when you were younger; i.e. before teens.

I found the other day a "theory" of mine; I went like so;

"Black holes supposedly are singularities.Before the big bang, all the mass and energy and other random physics thingies were possibly all at one point, sometimes reffered to asA singularity.

Hence, it may be possible that black holes canot absorb mass infinitely, maybe there is a maximum saturation point at which the black hole detonates.Hence the big bang.Big bangs may also be happening at this very moment far beyond our visible universe. (would the explosion be so big as to destroy all evidence of previous existenses?)"

Bear in mind, at this point, my idea of the universe was that it was infinite. Also, there ARE spelling errors, but these are original....for sentimentality I included them. I was 11 at the time.

What I want to know is did any of you have any "theories"?Also, dicussion on feasability of our "theories" would be good.

OP, I have a feeling you, like me, were reading a lot of Stephen Hawking at that age.

Heh, I only started reading stephen hawkings stuff when I was in double digits.I was just crazy as a kid. Scratch that. I am just crazy.

I Am Raven wrote:Math is like a penis: it can be very satisfactory, but also a pain in the ass.

RedvsBlue wrote:Wash: That was the worst throw ever. Of all time.Caboose: Not my fault. Someone put a wall in my way.

wst wrote:I used to think aircraft control surfaces worked by pushing the air around, so if the left aileron was pointing down, it would push the air down, making the plane roll. It worked in practise as well, with many an errant paper-plane being fixed with a twist of the wings.

Turns out I was sorta doing the opposite of the Bernoulli effect.

It worked out in practice because it is right. The air pushes the flying airplane up (there is nothing else to do it), so Newton's third law says that the airplane must be pushing the air downward. Nothing prevents air being pushed downward from moving downward, so down it goes. Pushing the air downward can be done by air striking a tilted surface, i.e. by angle of attack. This is how the ailerons work and partly how the wings work. The air can also wind up going downward because it takes a looping path over the top of the wing, moving downward toward the rear edge of the wing, and continuing to move downward when the wing is no longer there. This effect is the Bernoulli Effect, and it contributes to the lift of the wings. I understand that the lift is mostly Bernoulli, but IANAn aeronautical engineer and could be wrong. IADA* physicist so I am sure that air would move down because of any Bernoulli effect acting on the wing.

*IADA = "I am definitely a." At least I am supposed to be a physicist, or close enough to fool a lot of people.

"An expert is a person who has already made all possible mistakes." -- paraphrase of a statement by Niels BohrSeen on a bumper sticker: "My other vehicle is a Krebs cycle".

ACU-LP wrote:Hello all, first new topic for me, but I'm curious, how many of you had psuedo scientific theories or fantasies when you were younger; i.e. before teens.

I found the other day a "theory" of mine; I went like so;

"Black holes supposedly are singularities.Before the big bang, all the mass and energy and other random physics thingies were possibly all at one point, sometimes reffered to asA singularity.

Hence, it may be possible that black holes canot absorb mass infinitely, maybe there is a maximum saturation point at which the black hole detonates.Hence the big bang.Big bangs may also be happening at this very moment far beyond our visible universe. (would the explosion be so big as to destroy all evidence of previous existenses?)"

Bear in mind, at this point, my idea of the universe was that it was infinite. Also, there ARE spelling errors, but these are original....for sentimentality I included them. I was 11 at the time.

What I want to know is did any of you have any "theories"?Also, dicussion on feasability of our "theories" would be good.

OP, I have a feeling you, like me, were reading a lot of Stephen Hawking at that age.

Heh, I only started reading stephen hawkings stuff when I was in double digits.I was just crazy as a kid. Scratch that. I am just crazy.

Just remember, the madness inspires you. Chaos is creation and destruction, which in turn are both synonym and antonym at the same time.

When I was around 8 years old I tried to suck the gravity out of an empty plastic coke bottle. I had dropped in a penny in the hope that I would see it float.After many failed attempts I decided that the penny wouldn't rise because gravity was seeping back in to the bottle because I was too slow in sealing the bottle with my hand. My solution was to put the bottle top in my mouth and when I had sucked the Gravity out, try to screw the bottle into the cap.

I quickly gave up this experiment after getting the inside if my cheek caught between bottle and top.....there was much blood.

When I was a kid, I reasoned that the day was hottest around 3PM because that was the point where the earth (the local bit of it, anyway) started losing more heat than it gained from the sun. Many years later, in high school, I realized that I had intuitively stumbled upon an important calculus concept.

dic_penderyn wrote:When I was around 8 years old I tried to suck the gravity out of an empty plastic coke bottle. I had dropped in a penny in the hope that I would see it float.After many failed attempts I decided that the penny wouldn't rise because gravity was seeping back in to the bottle because I was too slow in sealing the bottle with my hand. My solution was to put the bottle top in my mouth and when I had sucked the Gravity out, try to screw the bottle into the cap.

I quickly gave up this experiment after getting the inside if my cheek caught between bottle and top.....there was much blood.

With some refining, this could be the coolest misinterpretation of flux ever.

ACU-LP wrote:Hello all, first new topic for me, but I'm curious, how many of you had psuedo scientific theories or fantasies when you were younger; i.e. before teens.

I found the other day a "theory" of mine; I went like so;

"Black holes supposedly are singularities.Before the big bang, all the mass and energy and other random physics thingies were possibly all at one point, sometimes reffered to asA singularity.

Hence, it may be possible that black holes canot absorb mass infinitely, maybe there is a maximum saturation point at which the black hole detonates.Hence the big bang.Big bangs may also be happening at this very moment far beyond our visible universe. (would the explosion be so big as to destroy all evidence of previous existenses?)"

Bear in mind, at this point, my idea of the universe was that it was infinite. Also, there ARE spelling errors, but these are original....for sentimentality I included them. I was 11 at the time.

What I want to know is did any of you have any "theories"?Also, dicussion on feasability of our "theories" would be good.

OP, I have a feeling you, like me, were reading a lot of Stephen Hawking at that age.

Heh, I only started reading stephen hawkings stuff when I was in double digits.I was just crazy as a kid. Scratch that. I am just crazy.

Just remember, the madness inspires you. Chaos is creation and destruction, which in turn are both synonym and antonym at the same time.

Hmmm. Now I have a legitimate excuse for being a nutjob. YAY!I had another theory somewhere, but I cant for the life of me remember. It was something to do with the physics behind pokemon....how to make it viable....

I Am Raven wrote:Math is like a penis: it can be very satisfactory, but also a pain in the ass.

RedvsBlue wrote:Wash: That was the worst throw ever. Of all time.Caboose: Not my fault. Someone put a wall in my way.

I can't remember my exact working but I remember predicting the gravitational constant about a year before I learnt about it in class.Something along the lines of of if x amount of mass bends space y amount then we can use one to determine the other.Now if only I could do it with something new

That's nice to know. I don't actually really understand the wikipedia article, but now I have evidence to retaliate for all the times people didn't believe me back then. Except that one of those persons is studying mathematics now, so she might actually know what I'm trying to be talking about...

As a child, I used to make detailed plans of stuff I wanted to build one day (I think I had no idea just how big 9 km² is for a garden (well, it had a forest...)), I really should look at what I wrote back then, it might be interesting. I haven't got access to it right now, unfortunately. There was an intricate device that would result in a circular swimming pool with handles, so some people could push it and thus rotate it. I should just have tried to rotate a glass of water...Also, I had complex theories of how and how much I would pay any employees I'd need for my giant castle and garden, as well as the farmers living there. I think it was some weird mixture of feudalism and communism (of which I didn't know anything yet).

Mous wrote:I used to believe and still do that we are all part of a virtual reality, but really nothing is real.I thought this because I noticed that if you close one eye, everything's tinted blue, and if you close the other it's tinted red. Just like... 3D glasses.Yeah...

I had this very theory for a while. But then I thought about my other theory that other people will see colours differently to us, but because of their conditioning, my blue would be their 'blue' so to speak. I eventually decided it was the same thing but on a much more subtle level; each eye sees just slightly differently and the brain attempts to normalize it such that it is hard to notice.But the theory about the people seeing colours differently could still be true; its just currently impossible to prove.

I Am Raven wrote:Math is like a penis: it can be very satisfactory, but also a pain in the ass.

RedvsBlue wrote:Wash: That was the worst throw ever. Of all time.Caboose: Not my fault. Someone put a wall in my way.

Mous wrote:I used to believe and still do that we are all part of a virtual reality, but really nothing is real.I thought this because I noticed that if you close one eye, everything's tinted blue, and if you close the other it's tinted red. Just like... 3D glasses.Yeah...

I had this very theory for a while. But then I thought about my other theory that other people will see colours differently to us, but because of their conditioning, my blue would be their 'blue' so to speak. I eventually decided it was the same thing but on a much more subtle level; each eye sees just slightly differently and the brain attempts to normalize it such that it is hard to notice.But the theory about the people seeing colours differently could still be true; its just currently impossible to prove.

I had that theory before too, when I was in elementary school. I remember me and my sister talking about it while walking to school once. I ended up deciding against it, just because the mixing of colors is also the same for everyone (mixing of light, and of pigment), so it didn't seem very reasonable to me.Then I got really pissed off last year when the teacher brought it up in Theory of Knowledge and everyone in the class was like "Oooh, what a brilliant, new idea!" and that was all they would talk about.

But it's true, you can't prove or disprove it..

Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath nor motion;As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean.

ACU-LP wrote:I had this very theory for a while. But then I thought about my other theory that other people will see colours differently to us, but because of their conditioning, my blue would be their 'blue' so to speak. I eventually decided it was the same thing but on a much more subtle level; each eye sees just slightly differently and the brain attempts to normalize it such that it is hard to notice.But the theory about the people seeing colours differently could still be true; its just currently impossible to prove.

Hey, I had that one, too, and discarded it for the same reason.

I do not agree with the beer you drink, but will defend to the death your right to drink it

I reasoned that the Bigfoot creature was in fact a member of Gigantopithecus blacki that had crossed over the land bridge into the states (which made sense to me given that most bigfoot stories are centered in its original Asian habitat and the United States).

Turns out it was the leading 'if Bigfoot were to exist, what could it be' theory.